When culture goes digital: Who decides its future?

Last year, a debate spilled beyond studios and museums, when more than 6,500 people signed an open letter urging Christie’s New York to cancel its first ever sale devoted entirely to AI-generated art. The protest failed, with the sale proceeding ahead and fetching nearly $729,000, exceeding its pre-sale expectations with millennials and Gen Z being half of the bidders. The message was unmistakable: even as ethical concerns mount, the market is already moving forward.

The question is no longer whether digitisation will transform culture, but to what extent will it do so ethically.

Digitisation at scale: A new cultural infrastructure for India

As technology is reshaping how culture is created and contested, India too is responding by reimagining how culture is preserved and shared. The Archaeological Survey of India has digitally documented over 1.18 lakh antiquities under the National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities. The Ministry of Culture has built a National Portal and Digital Repository for Museums, while sites such as the Archaeological Museum at Hampi now extend beyond physical walls through app-based virtual museums.

Under the Gyan Bharatam Mission, 3.5 lakh manuscripts have been digitised to safeguard fragile knowledge systems for future generations. At the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, initiatives like the Vedic Heritage Archive, Loka Parampara, and extensive documentation projects in the North-East are preserving oral histories, indigenous languages, rock art, amongst others. Complementing this, the National Mission on Cultural Mapping is charting regional art forms, customs, and languages across six lakh villages.

Advanced tools such as AI, 3D modelling, AR/VR, and high-resolution imaging are now restoring artefacts, predicting deterioration, and reconstructing fragmented works. These efforts democratise access for scholars, students, and the global diaspora, enabling immersive, AI-powered storytelling. Yet, as algorithms mediate culture at scale, questions of ethics, representation, and consent become central to India’s digital cultural future.

From policy to practice: Artists, tech & changing cultural narratives

Long before digital culture became synonymous with scale and automation, artists were shaping how technology could be understood, questioned, and used. In 1968, the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London opened Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition that brought together composers, artists, filmmakers, engineers, scientists, and academics from across continents to explore the relationship between computation and creativity. It marked an early moment in international experimentation, demonstrating that artists could play an active role in shaping how emerging technologies are imagined, interpreted and applied.

That legacy continues today, as artists across the world interrogate authorship, bias, ownership, and representation within rapidly evolving digital systems. Their work shows that innovation does not flow in a single direction from technology to culture. Rather, artist-led practice reorients technology towards people, ethics, sustainability, and public meaning. As technology continues to accelerate, artists provide something technical systems cannot generate on their own: cultural imagination and ethical context. Their work ensures that innovation is not only advanced, but also, accountable – shaped by values, lived experience, and collective futures rather than algorithms alone.

While technology excels at efficiency and scale, interpretation remains a human act. Meaning, context, and conscience enter the equation through artists. The British Council’s report ‘Arts and Technologies in India: Reimagining the Future’ draws attention to a new generation of Indian artists who are not merely using advanced technologies, but also probing their biases, reshaping datasets, and inviting audiences to imagine alternative digital futures. It is through their work that AI, gaming, and immersive media become rich with context and emotion. Harshit Agrawal’s ‘Land(ing) Page’ captures this shift with a striking clarity. Viewers step into a lush virtual poppy field, only to discover that the landscape is built entirely from social media advertisements. What initially reads as abundance gradually reveals itself as saturation – a powerful metaphor for how digital excess consumes both attention and the natural world.

Such practices do not emerge in isolation. They are shaped by sustained funding, institutional trust and long-term cultural exchange that allow experimentation to evolve into influence. Leaders such as Meg Jayanth and Prajay Kamat illustrate how long-term investment helps cultivate practitioners who embed Global South perspectives within digital and cultural discourse.

As digitisation gathers momentum, the role of artists becomes increasingly indispensable as ethical interpreters, custodians of cultural memory and shapers of aesthetic meaning. They influence not only what is preserved, but how histories are framed, identities are represented, and futures are imagined. Ensuring that digital futures remain deeply human depends on keeping artists at the centre of technological change, not at its margins.

Ethical imperatives: Intangible heritage, AI bias & global south representation

As artists help anchor technology meaningfully, the ethical stakes of digitisation become sharper when culture is living, spoken, and shared, rather than written or displayed. Intangible heritage, including oral traditions, rituals, and community memory, is often the least documented and the most vulnerable.

Ethical digitisation must therefore rest on community participation, ownership, fair licensing, and cultural accuracy. Artists and culture-bearers must be recognised as co-creators, supported by interdisciplinary networks that bring together scholars, students, civil society, and policymakers to shape a more inclusive digital future.

Consider Rajamma, an 87-year-old from Punnasserry in Kerala’s Kozhikode district, who recounts a folktale about a young boy whose honesty and compassion lead him to success. Her story lives on through LoreKeepers, a collective that uses something as simple as smartphones to bridge generations and build an online archive of folklore. Such efforts remind us how dynamic and deeply embedded oral traditions are in ways of life.

Building equitable, sustainable, future-focused digital cultural infrastructure

In today’s rapidly evolving digital environment, AI’s integration into cultural systems brings immense creative potential while simultaneously introducing serious ethical concerns. These challenges are further compounded by widening digital divides and growing risks such as algorithmic bias and deepfakes.

Only an ecosystem that combines infrastructure, governance, skills, policy, and sustained community participation can counter these challenges. It requires artist-led and community-led digitisation models to be prioritised, supported by residencies, creative technology funds, and skills exchanges. Shared infrastructure that enables interdisciplinary work – such as long-running platforms including Unbox Cultural Futures, Unbox Festival, and EyeMyth, which have supported U.K.–India collaboration across art, technology and immersive practice, including projects such as Abandon Normal Devices – can further foster collaboration and cultural exchange.

A call to cultural responsibility

With the AI market projected to soar to $4.8 trillion by 2033, India, along with the wider global markets, certainly has the opportunity to lead a new model of cultural AI that is rooted in equity, plurality, and sustainability. The cultural and ethical ramifications of the decisions made today will be immense. Digitisation holds the promise of access, equity, and renewal, but only if it resists reproducing biases, cultural erasure, and power imbalances.

(Ruth Mackenzie is CBE, Director Arts Global, British Council & Hema Singh Rance is Director Arts India, British Council.)